Carlson, K., Frazier, L., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2009). How prosody constrains comprehension: A limited effect of prosodic packaging. Lingua, 119, 1066–1082.
Presentation: Thomas
Summary: Chris
This paper aimed to investigate how prosodic boundaries and prominence affect the resolution of sentence ambiguity. In Experiment 1, a two-choice sentence interpretation task was used to see the effect of prosodic boundary on matrix interpretation. Results showed that whether the sentence has one (ip-only) or two boundaries (ip and IP) does not affect sentence interpretation. Namely, the role for number of boundaries in interpreting replacives is small. Experiment 2(a) used sentences with semantic contexts that biased interpretation toward the subject in the matrix. Results showed that it was the accessibility of the antecedent of the replacives, rather than the prosodic boundary, that affected sentence interpretation, which failed to support the notion of prosodic packaging. In Experiment 2(b), disambiguation of subjects with animacy was required, which was to increase the bias toward the matrix. The percentage of matrix response was boosted but the effect of prosodic boundary was still absent. Experiment 3 varied the prominence of target words. Results showed that having an accent on the matrix subject increased the matrix interpretation. However, the reverse was not true for subordinate interpretation. In sum, lack of effects of prosodic boundaries on sentence interpretation/disambiguation suggests the limitation of prosodic packaging. Instead, prominence plays a crucial role in determining the accessibility.
